A Tory minister has issued a stern memorandum to his staff banning them from
using jargon words such as “going forward”, “leverage” and “mainstream”

Describing himself as a 'grammar fascist', Alan Duncan MP has issued a memo accusing officials at the Department for International Development of damaging Britain’s worldwide reputation by using “language that the rest of the world doesn’t understand”Photo: EDDIE MULHOLLAND

Describing himself as a “grammar fascist”, Alan Duncan MP has issued a memo accusing staff at the Department for International Development of damaging Britain’s worldwide reputation by using “language that the rest of the world doesn’t understand”.

The memo which was issued by his private office sets out the sort of language that the “MoS” – Minister of State – no longer wants to read from his civil servants either in internal briefings or in documents issued by the department.

It says: “The MoS would prefer that we did not ‘leverage’ or ‘mainstream’ anything, and whereas he is happy for economies to grow, he does not like it when we ‘grow economies’.

“Nor is he impressed with the loose and meaningless use of ‘going forward’, either at the beginning or the end of any sentence. Thus we do not ever ‘access’, ‘catalyse’, ‘showcase’ or ‘impact’ anything. Nearly as depressing for him is reading about DFID’s work in ‘the humanitarian space’.”

“Officials are therefore required to express themselves in sentences which can be parsed and with grammar that sets a high standard.

“It irks when nouns are used as verbs, apostrophes are left off (or misplaced), compound adjectives (such as UN-led) are not hyphenated, and sentences are begun with ‘But’ or ‘However’.”

The page-long note continues that Mr Duncan “finds it annoying when conjunctions such as ‘which’ or ‘that’ are inexplicably dropped in a way which ruins the flow and logic of a sentence.

“He would also prefer to meet someone than ‘meet with’ them. Likewise, a sentence which begins with ‘Grateful for your…’ would appear to be lacking the prefix ‘I would be…’.”

The memorandum goes on to say that “submissions should have a logical flow and not attempt to fill the page with every conceivable fact that can be retrieved by cut and paste.”

It concludes with further instruction on the type of letterhead that should be used, and the styling for how phone numbers are listed.

Mr Duncan, perhaps aware that his memo could damage morale in his department, concludes on a lighter note. The memo ends: “Disclaimer: MoS is always willing to be challenged about his judgement on grammatical standards and will not take offence at a properly reasoned opinion.”

Mr Duncan is not the first minister to complain about grammatical standards in his department. Last December it emerged that Department for Transport had had issued a 1,500-word report listing ministers’ pet grammatical hates.